The last year at DSSD (now a part of Dell EMC) has been an extremely interesting one for me, and I’ve learned a great deal, which is always good. Some of the lessons have been surprising, though…

One of them is what I will rather dramatically refer to as Storage Stockholm Syndrome. Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological concept which defines a traumatic bonding, or “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other” and seems an appropriate analogy for the relationship that DBAs have historically courted with their storage tier.

I spend quite a bit of time talking to Oracle DBAs about the DSSD D5 storage platform, and what that means from not only a storage performance standpoint but also from an agility perspective and an architectural consequence perspective. We often get stuck at the first point: This is a really, really fast box1. My blog isn’t a sales platform, so I won’t go into the details on how fast here. The real problem is this: Many of the DBAs react to the performance in a very strange way…mostly along the lines of:

“We don’t need that level of performance.”

I know where this is coming from: It’s from 50+ years of systematically poor performance from the storage tier. I’m not referring to any particular vendor or product here, I’m referring to the fact that there has always been several orders of magnitude difference in storage performance compared to DRAM performance. Always, always, always – right back to the genesis of computer science.

This difference in performance has led to an abusive relationship between the DBA and the storage platform and (this is where the Stockholm Syndrome comes in) the DBA doesn’t want to change it. They feel some kind of bond to their old abuser, or feel that they don’t deserve great performance from their storage. They feel like it would be an imposition to request what the believe to be obscenely expensive storage (it’s not – it’s comparable to any enterprise storage) from the budget holder.

Stockholm Syndrome.

Let’s break free from our captors! Let me help: All storage is going to be fast, not just the DSSD D5. You will not be able to buy lousy storage at all in the very near future because the D5 has broken the impasse with the access time gap. It is the first to do so, but most certainly not the last – everything will be this quick soon.

I do believe that: <marketing hat on> Dell EMC has a major headstart in this </marketing hat off> but the competitors are coming, believe me.

Let me help more: When storage performance stops being the main bottleneck (it’s now CPU and IPC), you can spend less time avoiding I/O and more time delivering business value through a more agile physical schema. But that’s a topic for another day…